Jack Chalker - Balshazzar's Serpent

“There they are, people!” he thundered. “Three crosses. How good is your faith? Who’s going to be the first to climb up there and yell, ‘All right! Nail me here!’?”

There was some murmuring and a lot of wide eyes and open mouths at this, but, more, Woodward could feel the sense of unease sweeping through just the church part that he could see. They didn’t like this. They didn’t like this at all, and the older staff seemed to like it less than anybody else.

The Doctor let it all ripple around and sink in, waiting for the proper time to continue. Finally, he sensed it. He never understood how anybody ever effectively gave a talk or lecture without a live audience in front of them to gauge reaction.

“I see you don’t like this,” he teased them. “I see that, when the chips are down, you really don’t believe it all, do you? When they said ‘faith’ in the early church, it meant marching out into the arena with no defense to face deliberately starved and mistreated lions. It meant being put against a wall and stoned, or thrown off the side of a wall or cliff. For all this time since, for all those centuries, people have paid lip service but when it came to putting their own bodies there they balked. Very well. I am going to the Three Kings. God wants me to, He’s handed them to me, and I’m not about to second-guess Him. Some of my closest friends have agreed and are coming with me. Whether we come back or not is also up to God. We may not even have to. But we have to go. You do not. I hereby throw you the lifeboat to damnation. We will have to manage a full systems check and transfer those who can not consciously make this choice because they are still in suspension having had their bodies already in harm’s way and not broken. I’ll take no one who does not volunteer. When we reach our transfer point, I will cheerfully allow anyone, even if it’s most of you, to disembark. Go. Leave. Go anywhere you want. Do whatever you want. You’d better make the most of it, because the only rewards you’ll have are what you grab now. I don’t want you. I don’t want excuses. Just go. The rest—we will go together to the Three Kings or to Glory or to the Gates of Hell if need be!”

Critics had always called The Mountain a cult, a crazy offshoot of old evangelical Protestantism like so many others that were there before and flourished even more after the Great Silence. But Woodward was no cult leader and these people were not brainwashed or programmed in any conventional sense. To do so, as the medtech had said to John Robey, would have been to deny the free choice he so valued.

They would not follow him blindly, and he knew it. He would have it no other way.

“Now you have the information. The only thing you will not take with you is the route to the Three Kings. That we reserve. All else, go and good riddance. Don’t come to me with excuses, either! Don’t cry about spouses and children and all that. I want you all, but if you’re a parent your job is to choose wisely for the family. Just make sure it’s the right choice. When the time comes, just— leave . Wash your hands of all this because I will consider you dead and damned at that moment! That is all!”

Usually when the Doctor left the stage he got applause or shouts or some sort of audience appreciation, but not this time. There was almost dead silence in the hall and in the chapels and ward rooms. And, after a minute or two, a few began to whisper, then the whispers became talking, and the places erupted in a roar of conversation and debate.

When the duty rosters came out the next day, they showed eleven days until planetfall. It was too long, much too long. It would split families and eat at their souls.

“It’s just not fair,” Mike, one of Robey’s long-time roommates, complained for the umpteenth time. “I mean, we don’t have all the data, all the facts he’s got. He won’t even show us what these planets or moons or whatever they are look like, or why they’re supposed to be so special! It’s like making a test of faith of Russian roulette!”

Robey thought about the analogy. “Well, Russian roulette is a test of faith,” he noted. “If you really think you’re going to get the live round, you wouldn’t play. But this is the toughest test the old man’s ever come up with.”

“Have you decided yet? Brother Timothy Supulveda is organizing a group to continue the key parts of the teaching under a new banner, you know. He thinks the old man’s gone nuts.”

Robey in fact knew about Brother Timothy. He’d been with The Mountain for a very long time, maybe since the Doctor had taken over, but he always seemed to be on the periphery of any controversy, never at its center. Now he seemed to feel that things had gone too far, that this comfortable mission life had been thrown into jeopardy by this most risky of decisions. Timothy, in fact, had never felt comfortable going to search for lost colonies along the frontier. No good will come of it, there aren’t many out there, the real mission work is in the anarchic but established colonial groups with technology and political systems, all that. Now he was attracting many, particularly men and women with families.

“Do you think the old man’s gone nuts?” Robey asked his old friend.

“I don’t honestly know. Maybe I don’t have enough faith. Maybe I am damned and like the faithless servant should get all I can. I keep wondering about that. I keep praying and I keep coming to ‘the way is hard’ and I keep wondering if the way isn’t impossible for mortal men. And I’m not sure of the way anymore, either. You know how many distinct religious groups are out there, just on our side of the Great Silence?”

“No, never bothered to look. A bunch, I’d guess.”

“Over seventy thousand, from a thousand variations of Christianity, several flavors of Judaism, several of Buddhism, three or four of Islam, plus Hindu, Zoroastrianism, Baha’i, forty or fifty variations of naturism complete with shamans, black witches, white witches, and that’s not counting the folks who think we’re all property of some alien entity that’s using us for entertainment or food or whatever and all sorts of other stuff. When you start diagramming these belief systems they all sound remarkably profound and also remarkably stupid and primitive. There are even more than a dozen churches that deny that there is any supernatural at all! I mean, why bother with a church? A guild hall or even a decent bar would do, I’d think.”

“So you’re a true believer but you haven’t figured out what you believe in?” Robey pressed. “That sounds about as confused as the First Church of Atheism.”

“Yeah, well, why go unless you are totally convinced that he’s one hundred percent, and I mean one hundred percent right? Otherwise, like Brother Timothy, you think of him not as some infallible Pope but as a guy who got most of it, maybe more of it than others, but he’s not infallible and he’s not the only agent of God in the universe.”

“Oh, I can think of a good reason for going even if I were in the First Church of Atheism,” Robey replied.

“Yeah?”

“Greed. You don’t think Captain Sapenza wasn’t going?”

“Yeah, but the guys he stole that from didn’t go.”

“Maybe they didn’t have a ship that could take it. Maybe they were looking to steal only the very best. Maybe the timing was close and they never had the chance. But, I think if this location and all this data were known there’d be a rush to it like the rushes to riches past. I saw that jewel, that wondrous, weird jewel. It seemed to be able to reach inside the mind, to give each looker a unique vision for good or ill. What kind of natural force could create such a thing? Chance? What other wonders are there that we don’t know about, that are maybe too hidden or too big to have been brought back? Even in the old days, when they could make almost anything you could imagine, I don’t think they could have made that thing. That’s why it’s so valuable.”